Service requests that had worked their way
into the top tier of the agency's priority list,
then put in 45 projects of its own, as it had
done to varying degrees in previous years.
These substitutions generally come off the
bottom of the service's priority list or have
no priority whatsoever among service profes
sionals. To Washington insiders, such proj
ects are known officially as congressional add
ons. Outsiders speak a different language.
They call it park barrel politics.
THE AGENDA
hoger Kennedy, the National Park Service
director, was speaking of priorities, and
getting construction projects in the right
order was only a part of one of them. I
had doubled back from my westering tour to
talk with the director just 120 days into his
new job. I wanted to discover, if I could,
where this former boss of the Smithsonian's
National Museum of American History might
be planning to take the Park Service and the
system, before taking myself on one last sortie
to California, where Kennedy's agency would
soon be facing one of its toughest tests at the
edge of the Golden Gate. We sat in high-back
rocking chairs in his office in Washington.
His priorities, he said, were people, places,
and partnering-the latter being Park Service
jargon for its increasing dependence on part
nerships with state, municipal, and private
entities to help preserve significant resources.
"Doing right by the people in the Park Ser
vice-that's the first job," he said. "Do it, and
other good things will flow from that."
In my peregrinations around the park sys
tem, I had encountered rangers, naturalists,
cultural specialists, and resource managers
totally dedicated to their individual tasks
and collective mission, yet they were acutely
uneasy, if not downright unhappy, about their
working and living conditions. Almost half
the full-time rangers, for example, have to
make do on salaries under $27,000 a year, and
even that comes only after five years' service.
"It is now no secret," complains the nonprofit
National Parks and Conservation Association,
"that most rangers cannot afford to 'take their
pay in sunsets.' Instead they are taking their
leave. There is an exodus of experienced park
rangers to ... the Bureau of Land Manage
ment and the U. S. Forest Service." BLM and
the Forest Service offer higher starting salaries
and faster career tracks. Grand Canyon Chief
Ranger Ken Miller told me: "We've become a
training ground for other agencies-and it's
costing us."
Kennedy said he wants to upgrade the rang
ers' housing as well as the pay scale. "We have
some of our people living in shacks and
tents-the kind of conditions lawmakers
would legislate migrant farmworkers right
out of. It's a national disgrace, and it's been
a national disgrace for a long time."
Turning to the sorry physical condition of
so many of the national parks, Kennedy told
me: "We've got to catch up with the rot. The
irony is that as the nation focuses on paying
down the mortgage, the walls are falling in
and there are holes in the roof. And it isn't a
matter of just doing it next year. We've been
'just doing it next year' for too many years."